Professor Michael Zander QC reflects on the significance of Lord Neuberger’s analysis of judging in human rights cases
In an important speech last month that attracted media attention, Lord Neuberger said English judges may have been “too ready to treat Strasbourg court decisions as if they were determinations by a UK court whose decisions were binding on us”.
The President of the Supreme Court was speaking at a judicial seminar in Melbourne on the role of judges in human rights jurisprudence (see www.supremecourt.uk). The speech will have been of interest in Australia where it was given but it may have been aimed even more at readers closer to home (I imagine Lord Neuberger will have been pleased that The Telegraph, for instance, gave it some prominence). Basically he was saying that Strasbourg decisions need not be slavishly followed: “It is a civilian court under enormous pressure, which sits in chambers far more often than in banc, and whose judgments are often initially prepared by staffers, and who have produced a number of inconsistent decisions over
